Monday Movie Review

The film takes place in beautiful Athens, Greece, which is taken full advantage of and I feel bound to suggest you be thankful for that.
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We go through several full Fridays in our storyline as we build-up to the Monday that the title refers to. On occasion, the word Friday hits the screen, larger than life. When I started viewing, I had assumed we were looking at the goings-on over one weekend. It soon becomes clear that the time frame is quite a bit longer due to the fact that a sexual attraction turns into love. What the film examines is the question as to whether this love is something that should have happened or not. I’ll mention now that once we wade through these Fridays and then the all-important ‘Monday’ finally comes along, it doesn’t quite fit the narrative.

Our two main characters are Mickey and Chloe. Sebastian Stan, the actor who plays Bucky Barnes in the ‘Avengers’ films, plays Mickey. Actress Denise Gough from the films ‘Juliet, Naked,’ ‘Colette’ and ‘The Other Lamb’ depicts Chloe. He’s a DJ and a one-time musician; she’s a freelance immigration lawyer who helps people get into the states.

The two meet on the first Friday night through their mutual acquaintance, Argyris (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos). Since they’re both from America, he suggests they might be a good couple. Chloe has been in Greece for 18 months and Mickey for seven years. It turns out this is her last weekend in town. Having been there long enough, she’s packing to go back to the United States. Meeting Mickey, someone she’s intensely attracted to, is throwing a wrench in things.

After he pleads with her to stay, through a lot of sex and a ‘run through the airport to keep the girl scene,’ she decides to stay. She even ends up moving in with him. Be that as it may, it isn’t long before what brought them together might not be working to keep them in a relationship.

It takes him a long time to fully open up, but she steadily finds out more and more about Mickey through his sappy confessions and through his friends. It’s a big deal for some reason when he breaks down and tells her that he has a six-year-old son with an ex-girlfriend.

His ex-bandmate, Bastian, played by actress Dominique Tipper (Naomi Nagata in the series ‘The Expanse’), helps to fill in the rest of the picture for her. Chloe discovers Mickey likes cocaine. That should have been alarming. In a scene that felt out of left field, Bastian confronts Mickey with how she feels when he up and left her and the rest of the band high dry when he went solo. She goes into how she knows he isn’t happy unless he’s failing. She submits that Mickey hates himself and, therefore, everyone else. This becomes more and more obvious as he and Chloe’s sexual liaisons become less and less frequent, and he pulls away.

Scenes meant to be romantic come across as uninspired and substandard. Chloe is a strong and intelligent woman who just got out of a controlling relationship and it isn’t believable that she’d put up with most of the things she does. The grown man she’s now proud to introduce her friends to, referring to him as her boyfriend, acts more like a teenager every day. Chloe throws a party where she and her friends see Mickey’s entourage behave in the same manner, going so far as to put their genitalia in the drink of a female they disapprove of. There’s not a lot to like about things at this point, but Chloe continues to try. Sadly, that’s the way I felt about the movie. It becomes a bit of a chore to proceed when things look so bleak.

A case can be made that there are reasons to keep with it, the location, soundtrack, the acting (when it didn’t feel completely phony), but overall, you’re witnessing these adults make decisions that they simply wouldn’t.

When you’re being sold one idea, but something entirely different plays out on the screen, you not only get confused, but you also get annoyed. Just when you think Chloe’s the logical one, she does cocaine for the first time and goes berserk. I’m sorry, but there comes a point in one’s life when the idea of stripping completely nude and flipping off the cops as they’re chasing you down doesn’t seem all that appealing. Since scenes like this keep happening and are entirely out of character, I’d have to say, neither is sitting through this film unless you have nothing else to do.